1. Field of the Invention
The invention relates to a method and apparatus for delivering a predetermined amount of material such as food material to a moving container such as a tray.
The sale of prepared meals for consumption at home goes back in time, at least to the early days of television broadcasting, when the so-called "T.V. dinner" was introduced. The feature of the TV dinner is that it made available a meal which could be stored in frozen form and which could be conveniently heated and served on its own tray for consumption in front of a television set. In more recent times, the desire for prepared meals on trays and typically frozen, is based upon the trend away from the preparation at home of fresh foods for meals. The popularity of frozen meals has also been increased drastically by the growing use of microwave ovens which are the most convenient and rapid way to heat frozen meals. Accordingly, there is a need for equipment within a food processing plant to place predetermined amounts such as predetermined weights of both fresh and cooked food material on trays for subsequent freezing and sealing.
The trays for prepared meals typically contain a plurality of compartments such as a compartment for a meat product, a compartment for a starch product, such as rice or potatoes, and a compartment for a vegetable product. Conventional means are available for delivering a meat product in a predetermined amount to a compartment of a tray since the meat product can be prepared in slices, patties, or the like of fixed weight. Starch materials are conventionally delivered to a tray by a dispensing device which can conveniently handle accurate weights of rice, mash potatoes, and the like. When it comes to a vegetable product to be delivered to a tray, the fibrous or particulate nature of such products in the case of broccoli, cauliflower, stringbeans, etc., makes the delivery or the dispensing of a predetermined amount of material automated by apparatus more difficult. Accordingly, hand selection, weighing and delivering of such vegetable products is typically employed. Where the meat product and the starch product can be delivered by conventional food processing machinery, it becomes evident that the need for hand delivering the vegetable product necessarily complicates and slows down the production of prepared meals on trays.
The method and apparatus of the invention enable a material such as a vegetable food product to be delivered in a predetermined amount to a compartmented tray.
2. Description of the Prior Art
The conventional procedures for delivering food material of a fibrous or particulate nature, such as broccoli, cauliflower, stringbeans and the like to a container has been hand delivery of such food materials. This has been the procedure notwithstanding that the container or tray to which the materials are delivered has been partially filled by machinery for delivering a meat product or a starch product to the tray. The practice has been for a human operator to select, by hand, the amount of vegetable material from a supply and place it on a scale for determining that a predetermined weight of material has been selected. Depending upon the weight indication, additional material is added or excess material is removed from the scale. The human operator then places the weighed food material by hand into the proper compartment on the tray. It is evident that this is a tedious and time-consuming task. Where the trays are being filled by machines, meat products and starch products, it may be necessary to have a plurality of human operators to load the vegetable product by hand at a rate which can match that of the loading of the meat product and the starch product. A consequence of hand loading at a reasonable rate of production of trays is that the control of the predetermined amount of vegetable material, such as by weight, will suffer. Thus, in achieving a reasonable rate of production, the human operator will inevability overfill or underfill the trays with vegetable material.